yllus

Mike, Raymond - big fan and daily user of the webcam. Congratulations on the new product launch announcement, very interested in becoming a customer!

Congratulations to the founders for the launch, but unfortunately I had the same response.

In situations like these - intrigued but with no real understanding of what the product is - I want the video to show me a real-world example in about ten seconds flat. A more glitzy promo video has its place, but not in a post to Hacker News.

This is phenomenal work. A genuinely modern take on MUDs of old. Is multiplayer already implemented? I'm weirdly interested in starting up a good old MUD clan/guild again on an all-player killer server...

It's anecdotal, but unfortunately I'd say that the experience is much the same in single-payer Canada. I have never had a GP who is not trying to rush me out of their office as they seem to get paid by the amount of patients they see, not the quality and depth of care they provide. I now declare I have X questions up front and then work my way through them, ignoring the GP's repeated attempts to bring the appointment to a close before I'm ready.

Health care is massively broken everywhere. I don't know how we move the incentives in the system to quality over quantity.

Nice deck! And terrific market positioning; in doing my own research of trying to get all organizational data in a single place in an otherwise non-technical organization, I've done demos of Fivetran and a few of your other competitors and your analysis of their weaknesses are spot on. I'll be giving your product a try.

Really interesting concept and product - perfect for the times we're in! Desperately needs a video of the product in action on that home page, get on it! :)

I'm all for an Assassin's Creed style augmented reality view of the world! But I don't see why it's something 5G would usher in over 4G (or 3G).

I remember listening to a Masters In Business podcast [1] with the President of Qualcomm and listening to his explanation of why 5G was going to be a huge game-changer. He perked my interest by mentioning that he thought that _everything_ would have a 5G chip in it one day - garbage cans, mailboxes - but otherwise did not by my judgment give any significant reason that 5G would change something in the market when compared to 4G technology.

Does anyone have a strong reason they think that higher speeds and (I assume) low latencies would unlock something in the economy we're currently unable to achieve? I just don't see it.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2020-03-13/cristiano-am...

It's an incredibly busy position if you're doing it right! I've had development teams of 4 - 20 reporting to me, and I think my responsibilities have generally included:

- Being the point of contact between Development and the rest of the organization, fielding questions about what can and can't be done, plus t-shirt sizing on effort

- Keeping tooling and technology unified (not ending up with one project each using Vue.js, React, Ember, Angular...)

- Keeping up standards (around code reviews, documentation, testing and alerts, end user and developer training)

- Thinking long term about how features, services and tools being built today can be re-used tomorrow

- Decisions about budgets and how to approach a project (use internal people or outsource to a vendor; field RFP responses; negotiate and get paperwork signed)

A lot of communication (inter-team and intra-team), budget work and "architecting" stuff is a reasonable summary, I think.

I'm curious about a related question: Does a manager need to be the best coder on the team? How much does it help/hurt if they're not?

It still comes down to: Would you rather be seen as someone who creates value (profit), which is a "developer", or who works on odds and ends for the company and ultimately costs money, a "programmer"? Given the two options I think the most advantageous option is obvious.

I will admit however that my view on this is rather arbitrary. I don't think we really have a good way to resolve what's best.

Let's not make Mr. Esper out to be doing this for any other reason than because of the strong and immediate backlash from the violent street-clearing that occurred in DC. This is the same guy who said to state governors, "I think the sooner that you mass and dominate the battlespace, the quicker this dissipates and we can get back to the right normal." He is no champion of individual rights.

To draw anecdotally from my own experiences, its for two reasons:

1. It's simple to get started with, but complex enough to tweak to your needs in respect to simplicity of deployment, scaling and resource definition.

2. It's appealingly cloud-agnostic just at the time where multiple cloud providers are all becoming viable and competitive.

I think it's more #2 and #1; as always, timing is everything.

Sorry, use of the term GUID confused things - I meant that if an identifier string is generated when you click on the ad, and the purpose is to simply see if that identifier completes the app install and first use - that's not against GPDR. (In my head GUID means "unique identifier string".) Storing the GUID tells you nothing other than some device clicked on an ad and some device did or did not complete the app install.

Re: Ad/marketing attribution, that's not necessary correct. If the data point that gets sent back to Facebook is a GUID type string that matches the GUID that got generated when you first clicked the Facebook ad for the app and doesn't include data about you specifically, I believe that's fine. I don't myself have up-to-date information what data Facebook receives via its SDK but I suspect it is GPDR compliant through such methods.

GPDR specifically allows for anonymized/aggregated data on app usage or marketing feedback: https://gdpr.eu/eu-gdpr-personal-data/

For those wondering why the Facebook SDK is so widely used in popular mobile apps: Facebook Login is actually in the minority of reasons to add the Facebook SDK to your mobile app. The vast majority of apps will add the Facebook SDK because it contains Facebook App Ads; a library that "completes the circle" in terms of finding out how effectively the ads you ran on Facebook were at getting people to download, install and run your mobile app. So really the Facebook SDK is there to collect data of that advertisement being effective and provides both Facebook and the mobile app developer with knowledge of how their ad spend went.

Is that "spyware"? Some would call it merely wanting to know if your marketing budget was wisely spent - I suppose a lot depends on what data it collects on people.

More info: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/app-ads

Is this a fair summary, then: A site with free-to-read content must by default load no tracking scripts/cookies - aside from those that do so in anonymized aggregate form - unless the website visitor positively confirm they're okay with being tracked individually? That's how I'm reading it. Basically they want to change the default behaviour of websites to collecting aggregate user analytics only.

I suspect that a number of organizations that post free content and justify some/all of that expense with the marketing data they collect are going to look at changing that practice. More paywalls that require free user registration are the obvious next step. I wonder if that's not a step backwards for the Web.

I think I might be offside with this as per site rules, but does this link really need to be Breitbart? They're an incredibly deceitful organization that exist almost entirely to whip up people's bigotry and sexism. Surely another link can be found.

I think there's a balance to be struck here depending on the type of site and what organization you work for.

If you're thinking long term and beyond the time period that you yourself will be employed at your org, you should put serious thought into making as vanilla and out-of-the-box a build as possible. My organization has a simple path to getting new developers up to speed on how to maintain and further update our Elastic Beanstalk-served sites: Learn the basics of how EB works and you're good to go.

On the other hand, if I had put together a superbly optimized AMI and grafted each site onto it, a whole lot of question marks start to appear. What distro is being run? Who/what's keeping it up to date? How do you connect to it? (On EB, you type "eb ssh" and it logs you in.) What's the load balancer setup look like? Where is all of this documented?

I think the trade-off of a few percentage points of optimization versus the fully-documented nature of a packaged service and the simplicity of getting someone new up to speed... I'll drop the few percentage points any day.

In fact, a few weeks ago a media org I frequent often had a site outage - they run WordPress so I offered to help (it was the weekend and I figured their IT guy might not be available) and they took me up on it. It took me five minutes to solve the issue and twenty-five minutes to understand how their custom, minimally documented setup was designed. I don't think that should be the norm.

Elastic Beanstalk comes with the load balancer already in place, I've never had to think about load balancing as a thing-to-figure-out. And Amazon Aurora lets you set up a read replica / autoscaling policy as you're setting it up.

Honestly - it's a pretty painless, AWS-takes-it-from-there setup.

I guess we only have anecdotal evidence to go on here, but except for exactly one case I've always seen the organizations I work for get and wait for a positive response to their request before they display our logo. Does everyone else's experience really differ on this?

Instead of EFS, use a WordPress plug-in like WP Offload Media Lite ( https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/amazon-s3-and-cloudfront... ) that immediately moves those uploaded files to S3. Cheaper and more resilient (if you want to to be).

Everything depends on your organization's scale and complexity! We've got multiple developers and have a workflow built around Git (feature branches, pull requests and all that); in my opinion a professional development outfit that doesn't use version control is failing at one of its basic responsibilities.

There's a lovely WordPress plug-in called WP Offload Media Lite ( https://en-ca.wordpress.org/plugins/amazon-s3-and-cloudfront... ) that takes the upload locally and re-ups it to an Amazon S3 bucket of your choice. Five minute setup job (put in your keys and the bucket name) tops.

This is ridiculously over the top.

I run our organization's WordPress sites on Elastic Beanstalk (just do a "eb deploy" from your Git repo of the site and it gets up there), plus RDS (Amazon Aurora) and CloudFront. EB and Aurora auto-scale and CloudFront does its CDN thing.

I highly, highly recommend Elastic Beanstalk ( https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/ ) to anyone who wants their org to concentrate on creating value (new/better code) and being cost-efficient (use the compute power needed that minute instead of overprovisioning) instead of fiddling with custom server configs and wondering if you're fully patched up. It was a game changer for us.

I am very into this. Did anyone ever come up with an API style interface to control what gets pushed to one of these?

Aw, my couch co-op (before it was really even named that) focused gaming website wasn't featured in the gallery:

https://geocities.restorativland.org/TimesSquare/Arcade/2516...

I did click tracking on major Canadian websites such as Sportsnet.ca on these buttons (and everything else); we found that they're very rarely clicked and removing them would mean a completely insignificant change in the number of shares.

People do of course share those articles, but they don't seem to look for or trust web page share buttons. Even I rather copy/paste the URL into Facebook myself while on a desktop/laptop, or use my browser's built-in sharing functionality on a mobile device. This is all anecdotal but also based on data from hundreds of millions of page views.

There's a Yellow Vest Canada group on Facebook that is in full-on tinfoil hat conspiracy mode (wildfires in Alberta are being set by Muslims, stuff like that; see https://twitter.com/theBurlyChef/status/1133592129639313409 ). I wouldn't be surprised if the use of a European group to spread disinformation or even promote violence caused this to happen.

I think PHP had a couple of obvious advantages - it almost had a "first mover" advantage in that it happened to be installed alongside CGI-BIN on shared webhosts way back in the way - plus Drupal and WordPress being PHP projects.

But to me, one of the most significant advantages PHP has is that its documentation is terrific. PHP.net is simple, clear about parameters and return values (as clear as PHP lets it be anyways) and best of all has a terrific comments / examples section for each function.

Better documented is better.